Tomorrowland
Page 5
In the years since Morse did this work, other scientists have since duplicated his findings. Most recently, Pim van Lommel, a researcher at Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, conducted an eight-year study, involving 344 cardiac arrest patients who died and were later resuscitated. Out of that total, 282 had no memories, while 62 reported a classic near-death experience. Just as in Morse’s study, van Lommel examined the patient’s records for any factors traditionally used to explain near-death experiences — such as setting, drugs, or illness — and found no evidence of their influence. He too found death the only possible causal factor. He too found people with difficult-to-explain memories of events that happened while they were dead.
In other words, what Morse discovered and van Lommel verified is the same lesson I learned while skydiving: Out-of-body and near-death experiences are very real and very, very mysterious — but this latter fact, well, that’s now starting to change.
3.
The first clues to the biological basis of these extreme states turned up in studies conducted in the late 1970s, when the Navy and Air Force introduced a new generation of fighter planes that generated tremendous g-forces that, in turn, were pulling too much blood out of pilots’ brains and causing them to black out midflight. The problem, known as G-LOC, for gravity-induced loss of consciousness, was serious, and James Whinnery, a specialist in aerospace medicine, was the man charged with solving it.
Over a sixteen-year period, working with a massive centrifuge at Brooks Airforce Base in San Antonio, Texas, Whinnery spun over 500 fighter pilots into G-LOC. He wanted to figure out at what point tunnel vision occurred, how long it took pilots to lose consciousness under acceleration, how long they remained unconscious after that acceleration ceased, and how long they could be unconscious before brain damage started. Along the way, he discovered that G-LOC could be induced in 5.67 seconds, that the average blackout lasted 12 to 24 seconds, and that 40 of those pilots reported some sort of out-of-body experience while unconscious. Not knowing anything about out-of-body experiences, Whinnery called these episodes dreamlets, kept detailed records of their contents, and began perusing all the available literature on anomalous unconscious experiences. “I was reading about sudden-death episodes in cardiology,” recounts Whinnery, “and it led me right into near-death experiences. I realized that a smaller percentage of my pilot’s dreamlets, about 10 to 15 percent, were much closer in content to a classic near-death experience.”
And then Whinnery went back over his data and realized there was a correlation: The longer the pilots were knocked out, the closer they were to brain death. And the closer they were to brain death, the more likely it was that an out-of-body experience would turn into a near-death experience. This was the first hard evidence for what had been long suspected: that the two states are not separate phenomena, but two points on a shared continuum.
Whinnery also found that if G-LOC was gradually induced it produced tunnel vision. “The progression went first to gray-out [loss of peripheral vision] and then to blackout,” he says. “This makes a lot of sense. We know that the occipital lobe [the portion of the brain that controls vision] is a well-protected structure. Perhaps it continues to function when signals from the eyes are failing due to compromised blood flow.” He also learned that upon waking up, his pilots reported a feeling of peace and serenity. In other words, Whinnery found that the pilot’s transition from gray-out to blackout resembles floating peacefully down a dark tunnel, an experience much like the defining events of a classic near-death experience.
The simplest conclusion to draw from these studies is that, give or take some inexplicable memories, these phenomena are simply normal physical processes that occur during unusual circumstances. After all, once scientists set aside the traditional diagnosis of delusion as the source of these states and began looking for biological correlates, there were plenty of possibilities. Compression of the optic nerve could produce tunnel vision and neurochemicals like dopamine and endorphins could help explain the euphoria, while the neurochemical serotonin is known to produce vibrant hallucinations — but no one has directly tested these hypotheses.
What researchers have studied are the powerful after-effects of the near-death experience. Van Lommel conducted lengthy interviews and administered a battery of standard psychological tests to his cardiac arrest study group. The subset who had near-death experiences reported more self-awareness, more social awareness, and deeper religious feelings than the others. Van Lommel then repeated this process after a two-year interval and found the near-death group still had complete memories of the experience, while the other’s recollections were strikingly less vivid. He also found that the near-deathers had an increased belief in an afterlife and a decreased fear of dying, while those without the experience showed the exact opposite effect. After eight years, he repeated the process and found those earlier effects significantly more pronounced. Compared to normal people, the near-death group was much more empathetic and emotionally vulnerable and often showed evidence of increased intuitive awareness. They still had little fear of death and held a strong belief in an afterlife.
In follow-up research done long after the Seattle Study, Morse too found similar long-term impacts. To confirm this finding, he also did a separate study involving elderly people who had a near-death experience in early childhood, but were now well into old age. “The results were the same for both groups,” said Morse. “All of the people who had near-death experiences — no matter if it was ten years ago or fifty — were still absolutely convinced their lives had meaning and that there was a universal, unifying thread of love that provided that meaning. Matched against a control group, they scored much higher on life-attitude tests, significantly lower on fear-of-death tests, gave more money to charity, and took fewer medications. There’s no other way to look at the data. These people were just transformed by the experience.”
4.
In the mid-1990s, Melvin Morse’s work caught the attention of Willoughby Britton, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona interested in post-traumatic stress disorder. Britton knew that most people who get up close and personal with death tend to have some form of PTSD, while people who had a near-death experience have none — meaning, people who have a near-death experience have an atypical response to life-threatening trauma.
Britton also knew about work done by legendary neurosurgeon and epilepsy expert Wilder Penfield in the 1950s. Penfield, one of the giants of modern neuroscience, discovered that stimulating the brain’s right temporal lobe — located just above the ear — with a mild electric current, produced out-of-body experiences, heavenly music, vivid hallucinations, and the kind of panoramic memories associated with the life review portion of the near-death experience. This helped explain why right temporal lobe epilepsy was a condition long defined by its most prominent symptom: excessive religiosity. And given what Whinnery had found about hypoxia, it is possible that his pilot’s out-of-body dreamlets were related to moments when blood flow to the right temporal lobe was seriously compromised.
Britton hypothesized that near-death experiencers might show the same altered brain firing patterns as right temporal lobe epileptics. The easiest way to determine this is to monitor brainwaves during sleep. So Britton recruited twenty-three people who had near-death experiences and twenty-three who had not. She then hooked these subjects up to an EEG and recorded everything that happened while they slept.
When the experiment was complete, Britton asked a University of Arizona epilepsy specialist to analyze the results. Three things distinguished the near-death group from normal people: They had unusual temporal lobe activity, needed far less sleep than controls, and went into REM sleep far later than controls. This was a startling finding.
When she examined the data, Britton found evidence that the near-death experience rewires the brain: 22 percent of her near-death group showed temporal lobe synchronization, the exact same kind of firing pattern associated with temporal
lobe epilepsy and the mystical experiences it produces. “Twenty-two percent may not sound like a lot of anything,” says Britton, “but it’s actually incredibly abnormal, so much so that it’s beyond the realm of chance.”
More important was what the sleep data revealed. “The point at which someone goes into REM is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,” said Britton. “We’ve gotten very good at this kind of research. If you took 100 people and did a sleep study, we can look at the data and know, by looking at the time they entered REM, who’s going to become depressed in the next year and who isn’t.”
Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. It works the same in the other direction. Happy people go into REM around 100 minutes. Britton found that the vast majority of her near-death group entered REM sleep at 110 minutes — a rating that is nearly off-the-charts for overall life-satisfaction and a neurophysiological correlate that supports the anecdotal evidence that these strange states are literally and completely transformative.
5.
Morse, van Lommel, and Britton are not the only researchers probing the transformative. In fact, just the opposite. Over the past fifteen years, as our brain-imaging technologies have continued to mature, a great number of scientists have begun studying the neurobiology of mystical experiences, be them out-of-body, near-death, or otherwise. Arguably, the most well-known of these researchers are University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew Newberg (he’s now director of research at the Jefferson Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine) and University of Pennsylvania neuropsychiatrist Eugene d’Aquili (now deceased).
In the late 1990s, Newberg and d’Aquili began trying to decode “cosmic unity,” which is the sensation of becoming “one with everything” and the most celebrated of all mystical experiences. Unity shows up in nearly all of the world’s wisdom traditions. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, meditating monks reach a state of “absolute unitary being” — that is, a state where they feel one with the universe. In Catholicism, for nuns lost in ecstatic prayer, it’s unia mystica, or oneness with God’s love. So common, in fact, is this unitive experience that author Aldous Huxley dubbed it the “perennial philosophy,” meaning it is one of the foundational cornerstones for all of our spiritual traditions.
To investigate this cornerstone, Newberg and d’Aquili put meditating Tibetan monks and praying Franciscan nuns into a single positron emission computed topography (SPECT) scanner and took pictures of their brains at the exact moments their subjects reported experiencing unity. It was the very first time anyone had tried to use next-generation brain imaging technology to capture the spiritual. It wouldn’t be the last.
What the duo discovered was a marked decrease in activity in the right parietal lobe — which is a critical part of the brain’s navigation system. The right parietal lobe is an area that helps the body move through space by helping us judge angles, curves, and distances. But to make these judgments, the right temporal lobe must also draw a boundary around “the self” — a border that allows us to know where our body ends and the rest of the world begins. (It is also worth pointing out that this border is flexible, which is why blind people claim to “feel” the sidewalk through the tips of their canes and tennis players “feel” the racket as an extension of their arm.)
The SPECT scans showed that intense concentration temporarily shuts down the information processing capabilities of the right parietal lobe. And to profound effect. Newberg explains: “Once we can no longer draw a line and say this is where the self ends and this is where the rest of the world begins, the brain concludes — it has to conclude — that at this particular moment you are one with everything.”
This discovery marked a sea change. Before Newberg came along, telling a doctor that you felt one with everything was a pretty good way to end up in a locked psych ward. Afterward, it was the by-product of measurable biology. And that was only their first discovery.
The SPECT scans also showed that when the parietal lobes go quiet, portions of the right temporal lobe — the same portions that Wilder Penfield showed produced feelings of excessive religiosity, out-of-body experiences, and vivid hallucinations — become more active. They also found that activities often found in religious rituals — like rhythmic drumming and repetitive chanting — produce this same effect.
And all of this folds back on the work done by Morse, Britton, and van Lommel, helping explain some of the more puzzling out-of-body reports, like those of airplane pilots suddenly floating outside their planes. Those pilots were intensely focused on their instrumentation, much in the way that meditating monks are focused on mantras. Meanwhile, the sound of the engine spinning produces a repetitive, rhythmic drone, much like tribal drumming. If conditions were right, said Newberg, these two things should be enough to produce the exact kind of temporal lobe activity needed to trigger an out-of-body experience.
Another researcher probing this question is Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist with Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada. Using a specially designed helmet that produces weak, directed magnetic fields, Persinger applied these fields to the brains of over 900 volunteers, mostly college students. When he lit up their temporal lobes, these volunteers experienced the same sort of mystical phenomena common to right-temporal lobe epileptics, meditators, and — at least in my case — skydivers.
As a result of all this work, most scientists now feel that our brains are hardwired for mystical experience. This is not — as these researchers are quick to point out — proof for or against the existence of God. Instead, it’s proof that these experiences are as real as any other, proof that there’s biology beneath our spirituality.
Of course, as our imaging and measurement technologies continue to improve, we’re going to get a much clearer picture of this biology. By itself, this is profound in its ramifications. Out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, cosmic unity — these are all core mystical experiences at the heart of the world’s major religious traditions; they are the very phenomena upon which all of our spirituality rests. Yet it’s where this work leads that is truly startling.
Persinger’s helmet proves that not only are these mystical experiences decodable — they’re reproducible. Sure, today such phenomena are only accessible in the lab, but science always moves from ivory-tower research to commercial application. This means, at some point in the not-too-distant future, there are going to be consumer devices available — brain stimulators or immersive virtual reality googles or some combination of the two — that can provide us with direct access to the preternatural. So forget about the need to join a monastery or volunteer for a science experiment or, for that matter, go skydiving. Soon the experience of the numinous will be available via video game.
Amen.
Evolution’s Next Stage
THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION
There’s a pretty good chance you know something about evolution. More importantly, there’s a pretty good chance that the thing you know is how slowly it proceeds. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the “gradualism” of Charles Darwin or the “punctuated equilibrium” of Stephen Jay Gould (more on this in a moment), the point is the same: Evolution takes eons.
But not anymore. The changes we’re talking about in this story aren’t unfolding in millions of years; they’re unfolding in a handful of decades. Moreover, these changes are far more radical than anything that came before. And none of these trends appear to be slowing down. In fact, just the opposite. Which means, as many are starting to suspect, the era of Homo sapiens is coming to a close. We have massively accelerated evolution and the results are soon to fracture our species. In short, we are no longer human beings, we are now human becomings — and that, my friends, is a whole new kettle of fish.
1.
In 1958, Harvard economists Alfred Conrad and John Meyer published a book about the financial profitability of slavery — which was too much for a University of Chicago economist named Robert Fo
gel to abide. While Fogel was white, his wife was African American. Very African American. “When I was teaching at Harvard,” recounts Fogel, “she hung a sign outside the door to our house. It read: ‘Don’t be upset because you’re not black like me — we’re not all born lucky.’ ”
Not surprisingly, Fogel decided to prove Conrad and Meyer wrong.
He spent almost a decade on the problem. In his earlier work, Fogel had helped pioneer the field of cliometrics, sometimes called economic history, which is the application of rigorous statistical analysis to the study of history (this development earned him a Nobel Prize in 1993). Next, working alongside University of Rochester economist Stanley Engerman, Fogel began applying these methods to the study of slavery. As this enterprise required an understanding of caloric input and energy output, questions like How much food did the average person consume in the Nineteenth century? How much work could be produced from that food? and How long did that person live? became critically important. These questions led him deeper into the relationship between economics, physiology, and longevity, which is when the theory of evolution came into the picture.
To examine these relationships, Fogel needed data and metrics. For data, he used an NIH-maintained database of American Civil War veteran records, a physiological treasure trove containing things like height and weight at time of conscription, daily roll calls of the sick and injured, periodic postwar checkups, census data, and, often, death certificates. For metrics, he chose height and body mass, because of a steadily growing consensus among scientists that these factors were phenomenal predictors of mortality and morbidity. “Height,” says UCLA economist Dora Costa, who cowrote papers on these ideas with Fogel, “turns out to be a fantastic health indicator. It’s net for nutrition, infectious disease, sanitation, and demands placed on the body.” (As a result, the United Nations now uses height as a way to monitor nutrition in developing countries.)